


The Amazing Stephen Moffat: Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead - Essay/Review

by shadowkat67



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode AU: s04e08-09 Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Episode Related, Gen, Meta, Reviews, Russell T. Davies Era, Steven Moffat Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:20:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22339921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Summary: Okay, an apology to the Doctor Who fans out there, I get now why you are nuts about this show - its not just for the little gems such as The Empty Child/the Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, and the brilliant Blink. But most notably the best two hours of sci-fiction on television that I've seen in years, entitled: Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead. I thought Blink was brilliant, but Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead blew my mind. There's so much there. So many layers of meaning. Watching it is a bit like reading one of those very intricate and meaty novels by your favorite novelist - the ones in which no word, phrase, or sentence is wasted. Or like eating a five course meal, with every morsal having it's own distinct taste and texture and is important to the meal - if you miss one, you miss it all. Every word, every character, every phrase is important.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	The Amazing Stephen Moffat: Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead - Essay/Review

Okay, an apology to the Doctor Who fans out there, I get now why you are nuts about this show - its not just for the little gems such as The Empty Child/the Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, and the brilliant Blink. But most notably the best two hours of sci-fiction on television that I've seen in years, entitled: Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead. I thought Blink was brilliant, but Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead blew my mind. There's so much there. So many layers of meaning. Watching it is a bit like reading one of those very intricate and meaty novels by your favorite novelist - the ones in which no word, phrase, or sentence is wasted. Or like eating a five course meal, with every morsal having it's own distinct taste and texture and is important to the meal - if you miss one, you miss it all. Every word, every character, every phrase is important. That's good writing. Few people can write like that. And with great writing, comes brilliant acting. I fell head over heels in love with David Tennant's portrayal of the Doctor in these episodes. And Alex Kingston of ER fame, has never been better, as the mysterious Professor River Song. Nor for that matter has Catherine Tate who portrays Donna Noble.

I remember back in the day, circa 2002, when I used to have a sushi dinner once a week with [livejournal.com profile] cjlasky. He used to rail off at the top of his head all the names of the writers of every series he adored or episodes he adored. Telling me over and over in television it was about writing. He didn't follow actors around like I did, he followed writers. He said that it did not matter how great the actor was, in tv, the writer ruled and if you had bad writing - it showed. In film, he used to say, it was all about the director, although writing mattered there as well. And in theater - actors ruled, the writer and director had zip control once the curtain rose. But in tv? It's writing. To prove his point, he'd list off episodes of Ds9 or Buffy, pointing to the one's I liked and disliked, and ask what changed? The directors are the same, the actors are the same, the makeup, lighting, etc is - but the writer changes. I remember when BSG started - and cjl looked who was writing it - and said, "Ron Moore - who did the best episodes of DS9, and the guy from Farscape? COOL!" I thought it was cool that it had Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnelle. But he pointed to the writing staff. Don't get me wrong, cjl and I didn't agree on everything, we argued quite a bit, but on this point? He was absolutely correct. [Sometimes I miss those dinners, okay maybe not the dinners so much as the conversations.]

Steven Moffat was one of cjl's favorite writers - he'd been watching Coupling on PBS for a while, and suggested I give it try. I did and he was right. It basically made Friends seem like a highschool production by comparison. The writing was smart, witty, and relevant. I never laughed so hard in my life. Now, it turns out that Moffat, who'd at one time written an fantastic parody of Doctor Who, got a job writing for the revised series. And according to an interview reproduced in wiki, Russell T. Davies states Moffat is the only writer on the series that he does not rewrite or fix the scripts of. "For Moffat," he states, "I do not touch a word." And well he shouldn't, Moffat is a better writer than Davies. Luckily for me, it also turns out that Moffat is going to take over the role of head writer for the fifth revised version of the series starting in 2010. Other things Moffat has written include the excellent Dr. Jekyll tv series on last year, and a series of TINTIN films for Stephen Speilberg, which should be quite good.

If you have never watched Doctor Who, you probably won't be interested in the following reviews. It is however a series that you can jump into the middle of, without too much trouble - has a definite anthology aspect to it. Many of the episodes feel a bit like short stories or interconnected short stories in a science fiction anthology, some written brilliantly, some...skippable. Television is a bit like that, actually. It's hit and miss most of the time. I've yet to see a television series that does not have a few crappy episodes from time to time. Which may explain why a lot of people don't have much patience for it.

Silence in the Library & Forest of the Dead [interesting titles by the way, since forest of the dead has at times been used in reference to books - dead trees containing dead writers words and memories. And Silence in the Library is what we are told we must have and is desired, yet here it has horrific connotations.]

The episode starts with a little girl talking to her psychologist in her living room. She appears to be under hypnosis. Dreaming of a futuristic library. The psychologist takes her back there, she is in a comfortable dark room filled with books. He asks how she has entered it, she says, " differently each time, sometimes through the air, sometimes on walkways", but it is her libary. Then there is pounding on the door, she's frightened, backs away from it. The pounding increases. "The library has been breached!" she shouts. "Someone is in my library!" And in burst Donna and the Doctor, who board up the door, clearly running from something, and the Doctor notices the little girl, or the pov that we are currently in, and says "hello, I'm sorry, didn't see you there..." She blinks and the credits roll.

Nothing is what it seems. As the story progresses, we learn that the library the Doctor has taken Donna to is more or less a side trip or unintentional stop-over. They'd been on their way to the beach, then suddenly he turned them around and took them to the library. It's also not just any old library, it is an entire planet as an library. Filled with a million, million, million books. All the books ever created and multiple copies are there. More than a billion. A planet filled with books. Devoted to nothing but books. The doctor announces they are in the biography section and Donna attempts to pick up a book, but he scolds her. 'Spoilers,' he states. 'You can't know your future before it comes.' 'But, isn't that a bit impossible, traveling with you.' 'I try to avoid taking you anywhere that could cause that sort of problem, which I'm apparently very bad at - because there's a definite problem here. No one is there. It is completely silent. Silence in the Libary.' When they do a search for life forms, they discover there are as many life forms as there are books. And wonder for a moment if maybe the books themselves are alive.

It's worth noting that Doctor Who like many science fiction anthology series is primarily concerned with nightmares or the things we are afraid of. It is also a series directed towards adolescents as well as adults, and will often feature a child's pov. So, whenever one watches Doctor Who, one expects to see a monster or something horrible pop out of the dark. We live in anxious times, exploring our own fears, pulling them out of the dark and shining a bright light on them, aids us in combatting them.

Moffat in Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead creates perhaps the scariest monster I've ever seen. Far more terrifying than the weeping angles in Blink, who in retrospect weren't that vicious. Veshta Nerada, the Doctor calls it, piranha of the air, or shadows that melt flesh. They hatch from micro spores in trees and are usually fond in dense dark forests, living off road kill and the occassional missing human. Every world has them, but not in a swarm this massive or this aggressive. Where did they come from and most importantly why are they here? We find out later they arrived in the books. Hatched from the bindings, made of wood, containing the microspores. Information that kills.

So what happened to 4200 people that were here? 4200 - the library's central message informs him have been saved before the library sealed itself to prevent others from being put in danger. They were literally saved - saved in the computer's memory or harddrive in the central core - kept alive in a virtual universe created for the child's mind that was melded to the computer ages ago in order to save her life. The child which is also the computer, "saved" the 4200 people. But it has been a hundred years since she did so. She has forgotten. Now with new people in the library, she is told she must do it again, by the virus checker watching over her - Doctor Moon. Doctor Moon tells her in a nice little twist, "This is important for you to understand. The world you are living in is not real. Your nightmares are real. And it is up to you to save the people in them." It's usually the opposite. The computer has become convinced its virtual universe is real, it itself is alive and this is its world. The realization that the universe is not real, and the world of the library is, almost shuts it down.

So information that kills, but also saves, downloads and preserves in cyberspace. The print volumes will rend our flesh, but the computers will download our minds and preserve us. Our knowledge, our personality, our dreams, our nightmares preserved in a hard drive, while the physical space outside it remains silent filled only with shadows, some of which can destroy flesh.

That's the A story line. Followed closely by the idea of what reality is as a construct. Is it what we dream or what we are living? Is the reality of the computer real or the reality outside it? Is reality what our brains perceive?

Donna is saved to the world of the computer. Her life inside it is the opposite of her life with the Doctor. She meets a man, he stammers, they go fishing, they fall in love, get married, have two kids...the normal life. The life most people have. But it's not real. Her real life is with the Doctor. Yet when she discovers this life, the one with the man of her dreams and the two kids is false, she resists this knowledge, fights against it, is horrified by it. Clings to her children, even if they are makebelieve. It is not the life of adventure that she has with the Doctor that she yearns for, but the life in the virtual reality world. That is the better world. It's the counter opposite of The Matrix - which theorized that the better world was the one outside of the computer. Like the child at the center of this virtual construct, Donna is pained by the fact that it is nothing but a construct.

The B story line, the one behind this one, concerns time and memory and how it changes and affects our reality.

River Song is not a time traveler, she is an archeaologist, who knows a future version of the Doctor. Archeaologists go back to the past to learn how to proceed in the present, they live in the past, it is what turns them on, unraveling the hidden secrets of bygone ages. Timetravelers, the Doctor states, point and laugh at archeaologists. Yet, it is she who sent the message requesting that he come to the library immediately. She expected her Doctor to arrive, not this earlier and younger version who does not know her and looks through her. A Doctor from the "past" - that she has in a sense ironically uncovered much as she would on a dig.

At first she's believes that he is only pretending, but in fact he truly does not recognize her. When he realizes she's from his future, and that her diary holds clues to that future, he finds himself tempted to do the very thing that he warned Donna earlier not to. "No," says River Song, "you mustn't look." "Why, " he asks. "Your rules, not mine." Spoilers. Constantly the word spoilers is uttered. A term well known to most who frequent the pop culture spaces of the net - it means literally being spoiled for future episodes, knowing what happens before it does. There's a sort of comfort in that, I suppose, but it also spoils the outcome. If we know what lies ahead, we will attempt in some small way to change it, or fix it, or attempt not to and inadvertently do so anyhow. We can't unlearn what we know. But forced to get the Doctor to trust her, River does spoil him in one small way, she apologizes when she does it, she gives him a word. And he is both stunned and moved by it. We, the audience, don't the word. It is whispered in his ear. The word - we learn at the end, is his name although we never hear the name ourselves. It turns out that he has a name and is not just The Doctor. "I gave you my name, I don't do that...there's only one reason, only one time I'd ever do that..." But she only nods. She's an archaeologist after all - more concerned with past than present, particularly her own which is ironically his future. "Don't you dare change my past, which is your future", she tells him. "I don't want to lose any of it, I don't want to lose you, the man you will become."

In order to save the 4,200 people and teleport them off the planet and out of the computer, the Doctor must help the central computer, the child named CAL. The child doesn't have enough memory space to do it by herself. The child's father melded her into the computer to save her life, and he gave her a family and thousands of books, all of human history to occupy her time, because the one thing she loved above all else was books. Unfortunately, helping CAL will kill the Doctor, so River Song knocks him out and takes his place. She becomes the memory conduit. It burns her up completely, just as it would have the Doctor.

But she's not dead. Moffat sets this up well - with each of his astronauts in their space suits who accompany River, dying, and leaving behind them a ghost signature on the data relay. We are told the data relay is what is left of them, their personality is caught after their death in the relay attached to their suit. It's a ghost voice or impression, the energy signature left behind. The future Doctor gave River his sonic screwdriver the last time he saw her. Before she dies - River tells the Doctor that he must have known she would die here, all along. That explained the strange way he acted when they last met, one of the best nights of her life, why he gave her the screwdriver. Why he cried the last time she saw him. He knew this was the last time he would. That when he saw her again it would be before he met her.

Here's the third theme - the idea that time and space are not linear constructs, they are just linear in our heads. In reality they circle in on themselves. Donna in the virtual world, thinks linearally, but she travels quickly to each point as one might in a dream and that this is the only world, the only universe - the one she perceives. Her virtual world would probably have included her childrens growth, deaths, and then start again, yet in a different way. (I could be wrong about that.) It is however the data relay, repeating itself, a pattern that repeats endlessly, with each child in this world looking the same to save space, devised for her appreciation. The Doctor realizes his future self had too many years to think of how to save River, so he must come up with a way, since the Doctor unlike River Song is not concerned with just one time but all times, he does not think linerally because he is not human and lives outside the linear construct of time. It's the screwdriver, he realizes, he must have done something with it. Sure enough he did, it contains the same relay system as the suits but more advanced. The screwdriver saved her mind and soul - her energy signature. She was downloaded into it when her physical form burnt up. SAVED. He races to CAL and downloads her into the system. She becomes part of CAL's virtual world. Except CAL imports her friends, those who were eaten by the Veshta Nerada, but whose energy signatures were saved by CAL and downloaded into Cal's virtual world as CAL did with everything else. River says the Doctor is the most impossible man, he knows everything dies, but he refuses to give in to fate, he refuses to give up...racing through time, away from the clock that is always ticking, possibly because the Doctor lives outside of time. So as a gift, he provides her with the life Donna left behind. And from time to time, he visits her, on her doorstop.

The idea of time as malleable, circular, is not new, but what is interesting here is how the characters grapple with it. How we handle death or the concept of death. The idea of data or energy making us immortal. We write journals on the internet with the view that somehow we have perserved a part of ourselves and in a way perhaps we have. Since I've joined lj, several people have died - anyabuttmonkey was one, another was collinwood. Both are however preserved online. And if I were to die suddenly, this journal would no doubt remain as would the countless posts I've done. I lost something at work on Friday, a whole file that I think I accidentally deleted, and was told by someone that nothing really ever is, there's an impression left behind.

Data is saved. In books. In photos. In Forest of the Dead, River Song tells her friend Anita, whose face remains hidden in darkness to fool the flesh eating swarm of shadows hunting her, that looking at this younger doctor is a bit like looking at an old photograph, a younger one of the one she knew. I miss my Doctor, she states, this is not him, it is, but it's not. It's like looking at photograph - in which you feel the image is not fully formed. Moffat refers to photos and books, the tv shows Cal watches in her living room having the ability to switch things off and on with her remote much as the Doctor does with his screwdriver and the data relays on the suits, stating that no one really ever dies in a way, not as long as they can be preserved within photos and computer relays, in the virtual space of our own imaginations.

I stated before writing this review that I miss my dinners with cjl, but the truth is in a way I will always have those dinners, as long as I can remember them, I can revisit them in my own mind and imagination. The same is true about those who have died - we can still visit them inside our heads. I still visit my Aunt, my friend Richard, my grandparents...I have those memories. And if I forget, I have the photographs and the journal entries. It's like a book - we can always re-read it. It is "SAVED". And those within it? Are "safe" inside. The shadows that exist in the real world cannot devore it.

Of course this being a horror show, so it's not that neat, or tidy, or safe, it is more complicated than that. Our minds can of course be infected, much as a computer can by a virus - Doctor Moon the psychologist acts as a virus checker ensuring this won't happen. But the Veshta Nerada act as a type of metaphor - a hidden virus in books that eats and devores, we are of the Forest and we devore the meat. They are the shadows in our minds, that lie in the dark spaces, and eat away at our memories, they are the microspores that deterioate the pages of books or photographs, and they are the computer viruses that eat words. We can't combat them, we can just run - the Doctor tells us, yet at the same time he tells them that they should run from him. And River at the end, tells her children in her safe virtual world, sweet dreams, before she switches out the light. Moffat leaves us in the air, safe but not, wondering.


End file.
